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Europe's 'Net Neutrality' Could Allow Throttling of Torrents and VPNs (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader writes: TorrentFreak reports that the European Parliament is approaching a vote on new telecom regulations that aim to implement net neutrality throughout EU member states. Unfortunately, the legislation hinges on a few key amendments, and experts are warning about the consequences should those amendments fail to pass. "These amendments will ensure that specific types of traffic aren't throttled around the clock, for example. The current language would allow ISPs to throttle BitTorrent traffic permanently if that would optimize overall 'transmission quality.' This is not a far-fetched argument, since torrent traffic can be quite demanding on a network." That's not the only concern: "Besides file-sharing traffic the proposed legislation also allows Internet providers to interfere with encrypted traffic, including VPN connections. Since encrypted traffic can't be classified though deep packet inspection, ISPs may choose to de-prioritize it altogether."
If some ISP starts "de-priotizing" all ecnrypted traffic, they'll soon have 95% de-priotized, which will make it useless anyway.
Not sure how thats not a problem. Its always how this starts. grab a part of it. then fuck up everything over time.
You will not know if torrent, your game, your mail, or http traffic needs to be throttled. They will decide on that and make the numbers say anything they want to get a financial advantage. That's what they do.
If they are allowed to set priorities for different traffic, how is this a net neutrality bill?
The torrent part I agree with: torrenting can be very demanding on the networks, and torrents are not used in applications that require real time. They'll be fine if their file transfers take a little bit longer. The encrypted traffic part though - a lot of traffic nowadays is encrypted, so that hardly helps. Furthermore, I don't think that punishing traffic that is encrypted is very fair: the performance overhead is not that great, and I don't understand the obsession with people wanting to monitor and inspect everything. Even in Germany it's a pitiful state of affairs, though not as bad as the US or England. Watching me browse Slashdot is supposed to further secure the state, ja? I don't feel any more secure, and I doubt anyone else does either. I'm very surprised they are as free with it as they are actually; although all (I hope!) banking sites are encrypted nowadays, if they were to read my bank statements unencrypted, I believe that may expose them to a lawsuit from myself...?
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
Whether the governments like it or not, the use of VPN and encryption is on the rise by businesses around the world
. . . it's not just businesses . . . but governments, as well, who use VPNs.
So when those Eurocrats in Belgium realize that their VPN is being throttled, they will suddenly change their minds.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!